On this post, a commenter writes,
By the way, one way to solve certain coordination / collective action problems like this – “I’ll only do it if I know a lot of other people like me are also going to do it.” – is through the ‘Kickstarter’ mechanism.
…offers people the ability to pre-commit to purchase the items, but only if there are enough other precommitments. One pays nothing until the number of other commitments reaches the target subscription, and at that point the commitment becomes binding, the money is transferred, and the product produced and shipped.
The problem of filling up a new private city could perhaps be solved with some clever variation of this mechanism, but there would also be the issue of how to enforce the commitment to migrate. In this way, you could come up with a new private city business plan that includes taxes, services, and selective demographic criteria, and test the demand curves. Putting aside questions of legality, one could even try the nightclub model and discriminate with regard to pricing (like ‘ladies’ night’) to bring in people who have a special ability to attract other desirable residents who would be willing to pay a lot extra in taxes to subsidize the residency of those attractors, whom they wish to live around.
Some remarks:
1. Wasn’t there an attempt several years back to have libertarians commit to moving to the same state (I believe New Hampshire) to try to make it more libertarian?
2. Cities price-discriminate plenty today. Think of subsidies to professional sports teams.
3. I think the way to run the kickstarter city project would be to have people state conditions for moving and conditions they would help satisfy if they moved. (“I would move if there are at least two good yoga studios and at least 200 single professional men aged 30 to 40. I would help satisfy a condition about the number of physicians, the number of single females age 30 to 40” etc.) Everyone puts down a large deposit. Your deposit is refunded if your conditions for moving are not met. Otherwise, you either move or forfeit your deposit.
The Free-state project comes to mind. As a first “mover” so-to-speak, I wouldn’t expect it to fully meet or exceed aspirations.
Ah, your #1. Great minds think…like average minds sometimes 😉
How hard is it to pick up and move versus how marginal is the voting system? If you target 18 year olds who “have” to move that lowers the first hurdle. Shrinking government jurisdictions addresses the second.
Your third remark is very clever and combines a few internet market-making, liquidity-enhancing techniques.
It’s be like the community version of a matchmaker website, combined with the kickstarter model. “CommunityMatchStarter.com”
There is an ebay / craigslist idea of looking for potential deals and zones of possible agreement, “What I need you to put on the table, and what I bring to the table.” Except it is more like a business deal or partnership former. Discovering potential communities based on stated preferences. Revealed preferences are, alas, not easily available except trying to do regression analysis and mine the big data of migration patterns. There is, like I mentioned, also the online predictive markets / Futarchy aspect.
Just like there are potential standard commercial trades out there, the markets for which the internet has made broader, deeper, and more liquid, there are also possible human relationships. There are pairwise relations, like finding a friend or a romantic interest or even a spouse. And there are small groups of subcultures (ahem, econoblogosphere) and things like online multiplayer video game teams / ‘collectives’.
And now the both of us are imagining taking this to the next level, looking for whole social contracts and entire potential, feasible communities. Everyone does what you say, puts their demands and assets on the table (or maybe the whole demand curve and space of possible trade-offs), and the computer mines the data and figures out that there are 250,000 Americans who would be wiling to move to found a new city in Idaho with each other and according to a particular vision of governance , and, as best we can tell, they would be extremely happy together and form an extremely harmonious and custom-tailored society with a form of legitimacy of meeting preferences of the residents that is more accurate than determining Democratic assent by counting votes.
You mention the Free State Project like a vague “attempt” at a movement. It’s now on the forefront of libertarian activism, hardly should it be written off that easily.
There are 15,788 Free State Project participants. They have been growing at 1,000+ a year, and the contingent agreement is for everyone to move at 20,000. So it’s within a few years of taking the next big step forward. Definitely not something to write off as a failure. My main concern is that the vast majority of bad governance is at the federal level, which they can’t effect even with a strong voting bloc in a state. Still, improving state and local laws seems worthwhile, as does having a community of libertarian activists concentrated geographically.
On point (3), to some degree that’s what The Seasteading Institute is doing with our floating city survey. Essentially it is market research to develop the demand curve for a new product, conditional on various features. Once you know the most desired feature cluster and its demand curve, then if that intersects the supply curve, you can do a contingent agreement to produce the product. If they don’t intersect, then you need to decrease your production costs to move the supply curve, find more potential buyers to move the demand curve, etc. until they intersect.